We Don’t Know How To Do Group Projects
If you’re a parent of a child who is in middle school or high school you are most likely familiar with this scenario: the Group Project. Whether it’s a lazy attempt to have less projects to grade or an effort to encourage collaboration skills, the group project is the bane of many a grade schooler’s existence. More often than not it plays out like this: of a four-member group, two will do the minimum work, one will do little or no work, and the fourth will do the majority of the work. Then they will get graded as a group and bear the consequences of their ability — or more likely inability — to effectively collaborate. What’s wrong with this scenario? Set aside the fairness of grading the entire group with one grade that may or may not represent the efforts involved, there is a single, glaring problem: no one ever taught them HOW to collaborate.
Flash forward to these same students now working in business environments. After 13 years of grade school and most likely 4 years of college education, most people STILL don’t know how to work well in groups. Businesses struggle with this today. In fact, the very expertise they have worked hard to achieve often is a roadblock to collaboration. In an article for Harvard Business Review in 2007, Lynda Gratton and Tamara Erickson explain:
Our recent research into team behavior at 15 multinational companies, however, reveals an interesting paradox: Although teams that are large, virtual, diverse, and composed of highly educated specialists are increasingly crucial with challenging projects, those same four characteristics make it hard for teams to get anything done. To put it another way, the qualities required for success are the same qualities that undermine success. Members of complex teams are less likely — absent other influences — to share knowledge freely, to learn from one another, to shift workloads flexibly to break up unexpected bottlenecks, to help one another complete jobs and meet deadlines, and to share resources — in other words, to collaborate. They are less likely to say that they “sink or swim” together, want one another to succeed, or view their goals as compatible.
So, even if everyone in the group project is “smart,” we still struggle to collaborate well. A decade later I found myself at a technology conference. Among the talk about technology management and digital transformation, I sat in on a session about improving the performance of teams. It’s was packed. And the session didn’t talk about technology. It focused on psychology, sociology and communications. Not what you would expect at a technology conference.
For decades we focused on technology and tools to help us do our jobs better. We are seeing diminishing returns and, one could argue, perhaps a decrease in productivity. The challenge comes with the ease with which most tools can be procured and implemented these days, often with the intent that the tools will drive collaboration. Tools don’t make you collaborate well. They are only as good as the people and processes you have in place. They will amplify — for good or ill — what you are already doing.
Processes and skills can be SUPPORTED by tools, but in the end it comes down to organizations taking responsibility for hiring for or developing the skills to allow for effective collaboration. There’s a lot of talk about “soft skills” like communication and creativity having increasing relevance in business environments. For the future of work, collaboration should be one of those skills we develop early and promote throughout our educational systems.
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This post is the latest in a series of explorations by Mike Fraietta and me into what we are calling The Control Scale, a guide to digital communication and collaboration. If you’d like to stay up-to-date with our happenings, please subscribe to our mailing list. Yeah, it’s old school, but email is not dead. Mistreated, maybe. But not dead.
